One of days I must have the Reclusive Leftist on my show on the subject of Sarah Palin and the left. We disagree on almost everything else but she has been willing from day one to call out her fellow leftists on Palin Derangement syndrome.
I finally had a chance to take a peek at her blog to see what she had to say about the last week and she wrote a series of post that confirmed her dislike of the right but were as honest as the day was long.
She started on the 9th:
As soon as I heard the news Saturday and read an online article (forget where) with the gleanings from the guy’s various communiques, that was my impression. Mind control, grammar, the possible constitutional ramifications and/or mind control of said grammar, strange obsessions with the currency and its frightening message to trust in God, nonsensical ramblings: it could be a page out of Vaslav Nijinksy’s diary. It’s not just the content, but the style. Classic paranoid schizophrenia.
So imagine my surprise when I checked in on the news later last night and saw that Sarah Palin had been blamed for the shooting.
In the post she insults the tea party but that doesn’t stop her from seeing nonsense for what it is.
Later that same day she reminds us of some of the non violent memes of the lefts opposition to Sarah Palin and says:
That’s right. He was busy calling for Hillary Clinton’s death and then, when Clinton was over, foaming at the mouth about
Sarah Palin. Lots of people were foaming at the mouth about Sarah Palin. There was the “art” exhibit in New York inviting people to play at shooting her with a rifle. She was hung in effigy in Los Angeles. Sandra Bernhardt said she should be raped, and not a few other people gleefully called for her death.Palin hunt image via the reclusive leftist
Was there any outrage about this at the time? Only from people like me, who were running around with our hair on fire, screaming to our allegedly “progressive” brethren and sistren “UR DOIN IT WRONG!!!!!” Everybody else seemed to think it was just fine. After all, Sarah Palin really did deserve to be raped and murdered and shot and lynched because she’s a foul c*** who needs to die, so what was wrong with saying so? Lighten up, bitch. What are you, a secret Republican?
And again she is the reclusive leftist so she makes it clear what she thinks of Sarah Palin’s political positions:
Sarah Palin is a Republican. That’s all. She’s just a silly rightwing Republican. The country’s crawling with them. Look, they’re all around you! They’re your county supervisors, state senators, congresspeople, governors, and former presidents. Remember Bush? Remember Reagan? Sarah Palin didn’t invent any of this stuff. She didn’t invent any of the ideas or any of the rhetoric. She certainly didn’t invent extremist violence, nor does she seem to be in any way connected with that kind of thing. She’s just an ordinary idiot Republican who believes ordinary idiot Republican things, like the millions of other ordinary idiot Republicans in this country.
What is it about her that’s so special? What could it possibly be that makes this utterly ordinary idiot Republican somehow a billion times worse than all the rest?
…and she gives her explanation but go to the link and read it, she deserves the hits.
Finally on the 16th she hits it out of the park on RFK Jr’s essay:
He just wanted to talk about the dangers of right-wing hate. Okay, fine. That’s cool. Let’s talk about it. But still: how do you leave out the sentence about Oswald? As a writer, how do you do that? I couldn’t. It feels obligatory. You write this highly-charged essay, you make a big deal about how ugly the right-wing stuff was in Dallas, you evoke the horror of the president’s death; even if you want your takeaway message to be about the dangers of superheated rhetoric, how do you leave out the undeniable historical reality that Oswald was cut from an entirely different bolt of cloth? Even if you tuck it in as a parenthetical throwaway (”of course, ironically…”), you still have to acknowledge it. Don’t you?
I had just about persuaded myself to forget about it—chalk it up to a single editorial decision not to muddy the main point—when I learned today that Eric Boehlert wrote an extremely similar essay in 2009: A President was killed the last time right-wing hatred ran wild like this. It’s exactly the same argument RFK Jr. makes, and with exactly the same stunning omission. No Oswald! Oswald has simply disappeared. He’s gone. And everything that motivated the man is gone. No Cuba, no Fidel, no Soviet Union, no Marxism, no Communism, no nothing. There’s not even a nod to Oswald’s real motive, which was the inchoate longing to be somebody, to be a great man, to be important.
Read this whole essay, yeah it’s hard on the right, but it’s honest and fair and from the left.
I will never agree with the Reclusive Leftist on religion, abortion, George Bush and a million other issues, but boy do I respect her.
Update: Thanks for the lanche Glenn but thanks even more for linking to Violet, honest leftists should be celebrated. BTW Insty readers make sure you read all three of her posts on the subject.
Update 2: A lot of readers think that I’m giving Violet too much credit. Remember a lot of us on the right were once on the left, it took a while for us to get it, its not a switch. If you want to let people find their way to truth the best way is to encourage them along the way.
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